


The Prophet's On My Tongue

by anonymous_sibyl



Series: Prophetverse [1]
Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Helo ShAgathon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-01-26
Updated: 2007-01-26
Packaged: 2017-10-04 04:11:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymous_sibyl/pseuds/anonymous_sibyl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My heart's dark but it's risin', I'm pullin' all the faith I can see.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Prophet's On My Tongue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inlovewithnight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/gifts).



> Written for the Helo ShAgathon, for [](http://inlovewithnight.livejournal.com/profile)[**inlovewithnight**](http://inlovewithnight.livejournal.com/). Request was Helo/Six (either a known or unknown model) with a prompt of "my heart's dark but it's risin'". Prompt, title, and summary from Mary's Place by Bruce Springsteen. This honestly came out more of a Six story, but as she sees Helo through her eyes so do we. Thanks to [](http://alixnoorchis.livejournal.com/profile)[**alixnoorchis**](http://alixnoorchis.livejournal.com/) for the beta; all mistakes are mine, not hers.
> 
> This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/). None of the media or characters written about in my fanfiction belong to me and I make no profit from these works. 

Yesterday her name was Mary. She had a boyfriend, a job, and she believed devoutly in the Gods. Today Mary is gone. She knows she's a Cylon Model Number Six; she has a boyfriend, a mission, and she believes in the existence of only one God. The conflict is too much for her, human or machine she cannot reconcile what she knew with what she knows, so she seeks solace in the things that have remained the same: faith and Karl.

He comes when she calls and finds her behind the temple. She does not weep, not at the sight of him nor at the sight of the place of worship she can no longer enter, instead she feels something she cannot, at this time, identify.

She wants comfort, familiarity, something heavy to hold her in place while her universe spins away. Karl is solid and warm, and he makes her feel… Does she feel? Can she? Or is everything that occurred before her awakening somehow less than real?

"Mary?"

She's tempted to not answer, that is not, after all, her name.

"Mary? Is something wrong?"

She throws herself into his arms and says his name into his shoulder. Everything's wrong, everything and nothing at all, and she has no idea how to tell, but for certain she knows she can't tell him this. He'd… What would he do?

"Karl." She turns her face into his neck and feels his skin warm from her breath. "Now. Here." She licks his throat, then bites him so he can't misunderstand. "Frak me."

He's shocked, pulling away, and Mary would have pulled him back so she could hide her face in his chest in shame, but she's not Mary anymore and Karl's cock is hard so she lets him go.

"I said 'frak me'." She unbuttons the top two buttons on her gray shirt and vows then and there to never wear that color again. White, maybe, for her rebirth, or red for all the passion and pain it has caused. "Don't you want to, Karl? I know you do. You always do. You like what we do."

"What the… Mary? Are you okay?"

"I'm better than okay." She is, she decides. Because she finally knows what she is and how to get what she wants. "Frak me, Karl. Make me feel good."

"We're at a temple!"

"We're not _in_ a temple." She takes a step away from him, another toward the door. "But we can be. Would that excite you?" When she looks over her shoulder at him he's glaring at her. He has never looked so attractive. "Do you want to defy the gods?"

He grabs her, takes her firmly by her upper arm and pulls her away from the door. "Are you insane? What the hell is wrong with you?"

"Everything!"

He pulls again and she sinks into his chest. He's stable and real and it's tempting to be Mary again, for him, for her, but she is beyond Mary now and she may almost be beyond Karl.

"Karl, please."

"Mary, no. I…"

"You want to. I want to. And I need you." Not a lie but not the truth either. Not anymore. She does not know what she needs but it is not going to be found on this planet surrounded by these humans. They can never understand her or her kind and she no longer desires to understand them. They are beneath her. "Come with me, Karl. Into the woods. One last time."

"Mary?"

"One last time to be wild before you go." Before I go. Before we go to war and I have to kill you.

"The woods." He picks her up and swings her around and around, her hair flying out behind her, then he smiles at her, confused. "Do we need a blanket? I don't have one."

"We'll stand." She can picture it so clearly: leaning against a tree, the bark scratching her skin, Karl pounding into her. "Karl. We'll stand. You can lift me."

"I can."

And he does, he lifts her up, lets her drag her breasts against him and curl her legs around his waist. She could come from just this, from the way she bounces against him as he carries her into the woods. She moans, throws her head back and pushes her pelvis forward to get more contact. She's screaming "now now" and he kisses her, maybe just to shut her up, but she doesn't care because she can't get enough of him.

They slam into a tree and she lets the trunk hold her to him so she can open his pants and reach inside. She almost wishes she could say he's never been this hard, but he has, he always is, because he's Karl and he loves her and sex and the great outdoors, and she cannot think with what he's doing with his mouth on her shoulders and his hand under her skirt, her boring gray skirt.

"Panties," he mumbles. "Off. Get them off, Mary."

"Can't." she curls her hand inside his pants and cups him, weighing his balls and stroking his cock. "I'm a little busy right now, Karl, you're going to have to do it yourself."

He pushes her against the tree and holds her with one hand while he moves away. "Stay here. Do not move."

He drops to his knees in the fallen leaves and roughly tugs her panties down her legs. "So long," he murmurs, licking a trail from her right knee to her thigh. "You've got great legs, Mary."

He drops her right foot to the ground and picks up her left, wrapping his big fingers around her ankle. She holds it up while he strips her panties off but when she tries to put her foot on the ground he says no and lifts her leg again, balancing her foot on his shoulder. "I'm too tall," he explains. "You need to be higher."

He's not asking and he's not looking for her to help. He's strong enough to support her and it's what she wants now so she shifts her balance to her back and that tree and lets him place both legs over his shoulders. Her head thumps against the wood when he parts her with his thumbs. She wants to scream out, but she has no idea what to say. She used to call on the Gods when Karl frakked her, as if sex was spiritual, but now she doesn't know if this new one God in which she suddenly finds herself believing cares for this sort of thing.

She shudders and sighs when she comes and Karl holds her there, hands under her buttocks and mouth blowing gently over her. "You're so beautiful," he says as he lowers her legs to the ground and stands. "You're beautiful, Mary. I—"

He can't say it, she can't hear it. "Karl, more." His pants are open and it's easy, so easy, to lift up into his waiting hands and slide onto him. "Frak me, baby, frak me."

And he does. It's just the way she imagined it, the tree rigid behind her, Karl rigid inside of her, and her mind nearly empty of everything. She's not Mary, she's not Cylon Model Number Six, she's Karl's and she's happy when she comes again.

* * *

 

The one whose name had been Mary died in the attacks long after Karl Agathon left the world on which they had loved. She had let him go gently, telling him she would be there when he returned, but she never was, not for him. She had done her part, known the people she had been told to know, provided the information she had been told to provide, and the memory of Karl was something she kept to herself.

When the attacks came she was ready. She went to the woods behind the temple and prayed, not to the Gods or the God, but to Karl and to what they had. It was wrong, she knew, but this was death and at her ending she would be what she was, and that was Karl's.

* * *

 

She wakes on a resurrection ship with all the knowledge she had been denied when she was Mary. She knows from the moment she gasps into the arms of her siblings that she is a Six and if in the moments between life and death she had been only Mary-who-belonged-to-Karl she does not see fit to mention.

She's begun to fear and despise humans by the time she's placed on that ship to mix and mingle with the whores and the civilians who find their release in them. She wears browns now, and greens, castoffs from the survivors who have no idea she is not one of their own. Blending as she does she's starting to remind herself of Mary.

It's the low-level officials she's after, and those who want to be, like Tom Zarek and his crew. For the most part she avoids people like Gaius Baltar who, she has been assured, will not betray her but will be unduly interested. She also stays far away from the military types because what little they know is often not worth the risk, and because she's been told that they also are being taken care of even if she hasn't been told how.

For a machine she makes a very good human whore, and the others like her. That's why when they hear of a party with a group of military types from Galactica they ask her to join them. She does and he's there, the last person she expected to see: Karl. Someone calls him 'Helo' and she starts, wonders for a moment if it's her Karl or if her Karl is one like her. Then someone else says 'Agathon' and the moment passes.

"He's a big one, isn't he? Don't waste your time, though. He never stays after the drinking."

That sounds like her Karl, probably thinking he's saving some young girl from a misspent life by pleasuring himself in his lonely bunk instead of offering comfort—and profit—to someone who needs it. It angers her that he's stayed so perfectly untouched while she's become… what? What she was meant to be?

He looks at her and she smiles, her whore's smile, her Six smile, then Mary's smile, the one she saved just for Karl. She's not the only one who laughs when he spills his drink and disrupts whatever game he's playing; he's the only one who doesn't. She can read his lips across the room.

"Mary? Mary!"

"No," she says. "But I can be. I can be whoever you want."

"I thought," he begins, then stops. "I'm sorry. I thought you were someone else."

"Girlfriend?" she asks. "Wife?"

He slumps against the wall and scrubs his hands over his face. "I thought she might be. I was going to ask, but…"

"She died. In the colonies. Just like the rest."

"Sure. That's as good a story as any. The real one is I went back and she was gone. She didn't wait for me."

"Girl can't wait for her soldier boy," she says, stroking her hand down his arm. "That's an old story."

"She was different."

"Maybe." He's responding to her, she can tell, she can remember. His pulse is speeding up and he's forgetting his grief. "Why don't you tell me about her. I can be her for you."

"Mary," he says. "Your name is Mary."

It is and it never was.

"And you're mine."

She is and always has been.

He is everything she remembers and nothing at all like the Karl she knew. It's Helo who bears this grief and shoulders hers; Helo who knows what it is to fall down and get right back up again. Karl never knew how to do that. Neither did Mary.

He kisses the tears off her face and she does the same for him. His lips are salty when they reach hers. This, too, is Helo, for Karl never had reason to cry.

They both hear voices coming down the corridor and he presses her to the wall, shielding her with his big body.

"Agathon! What would your momma say?"

"She'd say 'be a gentleman and don't ignore your lady for your friends'."

"All right then, son. You be on time for your shift."

"Yes, sir."

She offers a room after the old man leaves, not her room but a friend's. He's on her before the door closes, calling her Mary and stripping the dull clothes from her body. He always was a curious combination of strength and gentleness, and he's more so now. Grief and war have been good for him, in their own way.

"You've got legs just like her. Wrap them around me."

She does, but not the way he wants, not over his shoulders lifting her cunt to his mouth. Instead she tangles her ankles with his and spins until he's the one leaning on the bed and she's on top.

"Let me take care of you."

"Mary," is all he says and that's enough.

She takes her time with him, worships with mouth and hands every part of the body she exposes, long past caring if the Gods or God disapproves of this. In her mind she's back in the woods, leaves crunching under her knees and the sun burning her fair skin, and Karl is the only god she needs.

She spends time relearning him, blessing each new scar with her mouth and hands, wondering where and how he's gained them. In her projection they fade under her kisses, vanish without a sound. She's remaking him into Karl, just as he's recreating Mary.

When she reaches his pants and her first warm breath blows over his cock he sighs and cups her cheek in his hand, lifting her face to look or be looked at. With his thumb he wipes away her tears, smears them over her mouth mixing them with his own emissions. She doesn't move until he releases her.

She has more skill as Six but it's Mary he wants so it's Mary she gives him, a Mary hardened by loss and betrayal, a Mary rejoicing in rediscovering her lost boy only to know she must leave him again. She resists the knowledge that she gives him herself.

For his part he takes, holds her head while she swallows him, kisses her mouth after, tongue twining with hers, folds his body over and around hers as if he could absorb her.

"Mary," he says over and again. "Mary, I…" This time she lets him finish.

I love you, Karl, she thinks but doesn't say. In her projection she smells smoke and sees fire. The cities are gone and she is burning. Above her, Karl is snow.

* * *

 

_She took her own life. She was killed in a firefight on Caprica. She died from a virus. Karl killed her with tears on his face to save his own race from losing their humanity._

She stands on New Caprica a conqueror. She gives birth to a miracle. She murders one of her own. She sees the humans revolt. She runs through the woods. She faces the fire in the sky with a smile.

She is everything. She knows everything. She sees God.

She wakes, memories of the time between fade.

Given the choice to find a home of their own or seek Earth, she chooses Earth.

Legend has it, there is snow.


End file.
